The latest mix, the 64barchallenge volume 6, has had nearly 400 plays on Mixcloud alone, If you add up the other sites, that number doubles, and if you add the 5.5k plays thanks to it’s appearance on Solid Steel radio, it’s made quite an impact.

“Thanks to Mixcloud for featuring us,” said Kovas. “I am a huge fan of the site and so when they told me this was happening I thought ‘result’ this is bound to mean more plays and more exposure for the project.”

The 64 bar challenge mix series ran six mix albums in a two-year period and featured DJs and producers who came together through the Ninja Tune records forum.

DJ Kovas was the man who came up with the concept where by everyone involved votes for a tempo to make a track 64 bars in length. He explained the project

“It was an idea that just seemed to catch everyone’s imagination. It gave people a reason to start writing beats. A lot of the people of the project had either fallen out of love with making music, or life had got in the way and their music production gear was gathering dust.

“The 64 bar challenge gave everyone a focus.

“The first mix was turned around within a couple of weeks, and It was really well received. Numbers were small, but it had a couple of hundred plays on Postbocks in the first week.

“That was encouragement enough to do another one, and then a third.”

By this stage, the projects were taking up to five months to put together, so the fourth mix was earmarked as the final one in the series.

“It was just becoming too much like a job,” said Kovas. “Liaising with the 30 or so producers, getting the artwork sorted, running the blog, generating pr, uploading and promoting the mixes, it was hard work.”

But the results kept improving and the fourth mix hit 500 plays within 48 hours. Still small, but big enough for the community to call for a fifth mix.

In the end, the sixth mix was released in September 2011, with DJ Food at the controls.

“Having DJ Food on board for the final mix felt like a fitting end. He had backed the project for a while and everyone respects how well he put the mix together, it’s unquestionably the best one of the lot, so a perfect time to call it a day.”

A while back, the Cut and Run project was devised by 64bar’s Techdef and Red Havoc, and on the day the video hits you tube, we thought it would be a cool idea to hightlight what is a very creative concept, done well.

The idea behind the game was that the first participant would produce four bars of original music, send the finished four bars to a nominated member who would assemble the finished pierce, and then send just their fourth bar to the next player who would then develop their own four bars from that point and repeat the process.